Some died simply because they didn't like fans, didn't want to run their air conditioning, or were afraid to open their windows to the threat of crime that hangs over some neighborhoods like an ever-looming thunderstorm.

But they weren't, for the most part, the second-hand victims of loneliness, collapsing in their dark, silent, humid homes because no one cared enough to offer the help that would have saved them.

Frederick Wilson Jr. died as his 83-year-old father tried to clasp him in his arms, kneeling next to his bed as if he were uttering childhood prayers.

Then, minutes later, the heavyset 47-year-old man who "became a Christian in his early years," as his mother put it, was taken from the Englewood home where his family has lived for 44 years.

Saturday night, he was just one of seven victims in the back of a van.

By Monday, there were 179 official victims of the heat that killed Wilson in an upstairs bedroom as hot as a boiler room. The number was expected to reach 300 or more once the Cook County medical examiner's office worked its way through the corpses still awaiting autopsies in funeral homes and refrigerated trailers.

In the stream of bodies, numbers and questions, the victims of this natural disaster slid quickly into anonymity.

They weren't the random jumble of people who end up on an ill-fated plane. Most of the heat victims were elderly. Many were ill or weak. A number were poor. A few drank or acted a little strange, or otherwise inhabited the dim pockets of society.

There are people who remember and mourn them.

Her head crooked and her eyes red, Mary Ann Koranek motioned limply in the direction of a floor fan in the red cottage house she shared for years with her cousin, Joseph O'Brien, in the 2200 block of West Huron Street.

"It don't work. I'm throwing the thing out," she said Monday.

On Friday, O'Brien fell over the fan after he collapsed and died from a heart attack.

An aunt, Rose Armento, found his body at about 3 p.m., sprawled on the floor with Pepper, a family labrador, barking over him.

O'Brien, called "Joey" by the neighbors in the area where he had lived his 58 years, had medical problems and was overweight. But Koranek, who O'Brien nicknamed "Bubs," said he was equipped to deal with the heat.

He was "drinking a lot of fluids," and just that morning had made a pitcher of strawberry Kool-Aid to drink while watching television, she said.

" `Bubs, taste it,' he asked me. `See if I made it good.' I told him, `Boy, you sure made it good,' " Koranek recalled, weeping.

After she made lunch, Koranek left to see about her car. O'Brien called his estranged wife to complain about the heat, and she suggested a shower might help him cool off. That's likely where he was headed when he died, Koranek said.

She had planned to bring up a window air conditioner from the basement. "But it was too hard," she said. "I blame myself."

As police Monday took away the bodies of Marie and Anderson Brown from their apartment in the 5900 block of South Union Avenue, their families asked themselves if they were somehow at fault for the elderly couple's deaths.

The Browns, like a number of victims, died in a home where the windows were shut and the fans silent.

On Friday, Marie Brown, 72, and her sister, Marjorie Payton, chatted on the phone, as they did every day. Naturally, they complained about the weather.

Payton reminded her sister to keep the fans on and the windows open. But her sister insisted Anderson Brown, 84, couldn't stand the fans, Payton said.

"It's just strange," said Orlando Brown, the couple's grandson, and a Chicago police officer. ". . . there wasn't a day that one of us didn't talk to them. My sister was there on Friday."

The couple had held their family together, their relatives said, and only ventured from their modest apartment for family parties.

"I just feel empty and a little angry," Brown said, shaking his head. ". . . you begin to second-guess yourself. You wonder if you could have done something else."

Not much could have been done for Tom Asberry, who lived in the 3900 block of West Van Buren Street and died there Friday night of a heat-induced heart attack.

Asberry, 63, had felt heat, thick Louisiana heat as he picked cotton on his father's farm. And he didn't need any fans to keep him cool.

"He said they made him sick," said his niece, Julia Humphrey, 72. "Fans, air conditioning-whatever he wanted, he had it," she said.

Chester Lesniewski was known as a frugal man in the trailer park where he lived on the city's Southeast Side. So frugal, the World War II veteran and former railroad worker kept warm with an electric heater in the winter and didn't run his air conditioner in the summer. He also kept the windows to his trailer closed.

"We yelled at him about opening the windows," said neighbor Nancy Salazar, who unsuccessfully tried to find someone to donate a furnace to Lesniewski, who lived on a fixed income. "He was stubborn. He was 84 years old."